Volume 11 Issue 4

Seven decades ago plans for the first Edinburgh International Festival, which finally took place in 1947, were well underway. Its promoters were visionaries who through art and culture aspired to unite nations and peoples who for six long and calamitous years were hellbent on wiping each other out....

The quality of Gavin Francis’ books belies the fact that writing is not his only occupation. Born in Fife in 1975, he qualified from medical school in Edinburgh in 1999 and spent ten years travelling around the world.

From time immemorial Glaswegians and Edinburghers have rejoiced in mutual disrespect. Early visitors to Glasgow were apt often to compare it to its rival an hour or so away as ScotRail trundles and invariably they favoured the latter.

Whilst history may be one of the oldest scholarly disciplines, it has, until more recent times mostly averted its gaze from that other so-called ‘oldest profession’, prostitution, particularly in the Scottish context.

Paul Mason continues to be much in the news despite having left his job as the Economics Editor at Channel 4. He is an itinerant prophet of post-capitalism and high-profile supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

The late Robert David MacDonald, director, playwright, translator and one of the trio who ran the Citizens’ Theatre in the days which have already receded into myth, liked to say that they do not erect statues to critics. And indeed they do not, but critics play their part in having statues erected...

Though the blurb describes James Robertson’s To Be Continued as a madcap adventure, I turned over the first page with all the gaiety of a blobfish caught in a trawler’s net.
Its main character, Douglas Findhorn Elder, is a middle-aged journalist in the grip of an existential crisis brought on by...

Not so long ago, if the hype was to be believed, the book was doomed. Jeremiahs joyfully foretold of its imminent demise and imagined a paperless future in which trees could grow tall without fear of being hacked down, pulped and transformed into the Sun. Nor were book lovers any more sanguine.
It...

Jon Sigurdsson, a senior civil servant in Whitehall, begins the day in which this long novel takes place, trying to save a fledgling blackbird.
It is a summer’s morning, shortly before seven, and he is attempting to disentangle it from the netting in his ex-wife’s garden. Trying to keep the little...

Murdo MacArthur loses his mother and sister within a short space of time. He and his Dad lead an increasingly silent life. Dad, in his grief, seems to Murdo like one big No. Dad loses track of Murdo, even though they’re in the same house. Forgets to give him pocket money.